Even the Microscopic Aliens Want to Kill Us in First ‘Life’ Trailer

In the annals of pop culture, encounters between humankind and our intergalactic neighbors have not gone well. Either the extraterrestrials arrive armed to the teeth and immediately get to work vaporizing everyone in sight — your War of the Worlds model — or homo sapiens play the aggressor and fly into a violent frenzy of premature retribution, only to discover too late that the aliens have come in peace — think The Day the Earth Stood Still. Today brings a first look at yet another film about what life forms await curious space explorers, and true to form, even the single-cell organisms know enough to try to exterminate humanity.

The first trailer for sci-fi thrillerLifebrings death to the International Space Station when the crew make the discovery that their latest sample may contain intelligent life. It might just look like a little wisp of cobweb, but that’s a real live creature under their microscope slide, and it does not take kindly to being inspected. After getting a good grip on a lead scientist (Ariyon Bakare), it continues to evolve and trains its sights on the rest of the crew, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, and Rebecca Ferguson. The research mission goes belly-up and the alien goes Alien, stalking the entrapped survivors and picking them off one at a time.

Due May 24 of next year, the film was directed by Daniel Espinosa, the brain behind the recent Tom Hardy-starring Child 44, and a past Ryan Reynolds collaborator with the 2012 action potboiler Safe House. It looks like he’s got a solid handle on a premise that’s pretty hard to mess up — “trap people in contained area with killing machine” is as close to a can’t-fail schematic as you get. The most pressing issue facing Espinosa’s production, then, is SEO. You can already hear him on the phone with inquiring relatives: “No, you’ve got to search ‘Life + movie,” just googling ‘life’ won’t get you anywhere. The Anton Corbijn one? That’s not me, no. Try ‘Life + movie + 2017’. Okay, yep, you’re all set, Aunt Sharon.”